Rest in power to one of music’s living legends; Johnny Chickenmeat, born Jonathan Thomas Samuels II, July 12th, 1975-August 19th, 2022. (47 years young.)

Woody Guthrie. John Lennon. Michael Jackson. Lizzo. Johnny Chickenmeat. No matter your particular tastes or preferences, these names are undoubtedly in the pantheon of most important musical acts ever. Each year, new songs rise and fall, different groups or artists top the charts, but there is always a legacy of legendary performers who seem to permeate the culture in ways we may never fully understand or unspool within our lifetimes. Like a hidden bedrock that supports the foundation, these artists frame our cultural understanding of music, love, and even life itself.

Johnny Chickenmeat was one such artist. His songbook spans every emotion. Relatable, bizarre, and cloying. Epic and yet intimate. Snotty and indolent, to frozen in the fear of the mundane, to scathing and revolutionary, Chickenmeat took his listeners by the collar and dragged them through his psyche kicking and screaming. And if he held onto you, you’d emerge out the other side a little bit disoriented, a little bit in love, and a whole lot more aware.

Here are the top five Johnny Chickenmeat songs of all time.

5.) Johnny Chickenmeat – Johnny Chickenmeat “This is the Time” (1993)

The opening track from his debut album screeches into existence like a newborn baby opening its eyes for the first time. Two electric guitars seem to circle and snap at each other like wolves competing for alpha status. The extended howling intro quickly sinks into a crunchy punk rock riff that finds Johnny half-chanting, half-pleading with his listeners to tell with him whether or not this is his moment. Hindsight lets us know…yes, very much yes.

4.) Johnny Chickenmeat – I See You “Work Your Mouth” (1994)

Quick on the heels of an acerbic, brash album, Johnny Chickenmeat released a collection of songs that were the polar opposite of what anyone was expecting. Recorded in secret on his tour bus, this acoustic album captured the vulnerability and lyrical brilliance we would come to know him for. “Work your mouth,” he almost whispers, “So that I can know your thoughts.” It eventually becomes a blowjob song but whatever. There are a lot of songs about blowjobs.

3.) Johnny Chickenmeat – Feathers “You Know Me” (1997)

Fresh off of a very painful and public divorce, Chickenmeat provides insights a shrink would never be able to find. “I’m afraid of how well you know me,” he croons in a Sinatra impression, brushes skittering over hi-hats “I’m a lush without any pain.” A cathedral organ begins humming, spiking, showering the dour track with a kind of ironic levity. Yes, he does talk about getting a blowjob at the very end, but that’s only the live version. Listen to the studio track for a better experience.

2.) Johnny Chickenmeat – Johnny Chickenmeat “Hell’s Real” (1993)

The bass drum here fucking rooooollls, and it builds so much anticipation that you’re a bit stunned when the accordion starts the melody. The fact that he only sings on his inhales rather than his exhales is probably a bit overwhelming for a novice, but all of us smart music genius people get what he was going for here. The track ends with him coughing and audibly puking, which says a lot about the post-Clinton NAFTA years.

1.) Johnny Chickenmeat – All Alone “All Alone” (2003)

“Save it for the sad people,” Chickenmeat intones, finally at peace with himself. The guitar walks up and down the scales, and Johnny feels free at last here. This song is a young man finally understanding all the nuance and subtlety that accompanies maturity. He ponders being alone, he ponders being in love. The longing and strained steel guitar matches up with the hoofclops of his horse. Weirdly, there is no sex stuff. It’s more mind than body. “Save it for the sad people,” he says, “I’m not one of them anymore.”

Good song.

the spider is dead
but her web still remains
thread architecture spun between
the branches

a yellow and pink moth
a rosy maple
flies into the web
and gets stuck

no creature is coming to eat her
the spider is dead
yet she beats her powder wings
into exhaustion and dies
suspended in this silken geometry

nothing is gained
no nutrition is garnered from
this faerie’s demise
all eight eyes of the builder
have long gone stony and silent
and we imagine this is cruelty
but there is no such thing as cruelty
there is only circumstance
this is just what happened

the tiniest of things will consumer her
after all
the meek inherit the earth every day

i saw a bumblebee bouncing off
the glass of my window
and then he landed on the sill
and was still for a beat

and this life is a miracle

this summer air, rising and falling
with the thrum of bees and bugs
and creatures and freaks
the corn loves the humidity
the man loves the woman
the moon looks into us in our beds

I looked at the resting bumblebee
What can it mean?
Fat furry bee man flew again,
off to another flower
To catch pollen in his fuzzers
A duty for a dutiful man

This life is a miracle
says I, bloodshot and farklempt
with ass on step and looking out
watching squirrels and goldfinches
beetles and spiders
and freaks

Trying to tie it all together
as I tie one on
Summer is brief here
You can only learn so much

A Bunch of Haikus About Cats and Then Some Other Stuff

triplefur poof cat
grape green eyes hold a black moon
sliver that sees all

Red cat under desk
Mischief waits in his thick tail
He bolts with no plan

wipe sleep from cat eye
no time for last night, friend-son
this day is for you

Tibby poops in box
scratches gravel to cover
waits for birds to wake

Daughter snores on couch
Dreams a june bug or spider
wakes to the same world

Dazzled by whimsy
a moth got in into the house
Faeries watch faeries

Daydreams watch windows
Our maple tree sends out seeds
My kids watch and think

I am getting old
I will feel it more harshly
Cats sit on my lap

My heart is honey
My soul is inside these cats
I’ll give them a treat

Who speaks from my mouth?
When you look down an abyss
it looks back at you

A common refrain for Beard Bite Man dot com is that I would like to communicate. Mostly that’s what I’m getting at. I have a fat tongue, a beer-addled brain, a dour countenance. However, even as an introverted weirdo bugman, I think there is some insatiable bug instinct to touch your antennae to another bug and connect. Senpai, or anybody, notice me.

Even as a tenured elder bugman, salt and pepper beard and pubic flora, I am unsure exactly what I mean by this. (I do not have salt and pepper hair yet but i hope i will roll it out soon. We hope to be fully operational by 2024.)

Every piece of technology we ever interact with now is profiling us and taking high resolution scans of our facial structure to unlock our phones and looking into every text message we ever sent and taking in GPS data and just analyzing the fucking shit out of our everyday lives. Mostly useless information. For the comings-and-goings of our lives, this doesn’t need to be. How much worse would your life really be if you couldn’t type in “tacos” on your phone when you are barrelling down the interstate at 80 miles per hour and see a fucking promoted ad for Taco Bell in 5.3 miles

What are we doing

Yoncho chirps then jumps
Her fat belly finds my lap
I am not insane

You cannot be sure what parts of you are genuine innate desires or what parts are good ad campaigns. “Cotard’s syndrome comprises any one of a series of delusions that range from a belief that one has lost organs, blood, or body parts to insisting that one has lost one’s soul or is dead.” Chill out, I don’t think that. However, (the however kind of sucks, too) I think given the current superstructure of society, it would be damn near impossible to decide if you were dead or completely subsumed and placated.

So just think in a way that’s not dead. That’s a call to action. Don’t let your brain get fucked up by fluoride and beer. Hug your kitties. If you don’t have a kitty, you should get one. There’s lots of them out there. Get an ugly one. Name it something tough like Bruno or Stinker.

There are glizzies somewhere, but not here
Says an incense wisp of thought as it escapes my brain into the lunch rush kwik trip

I walked a bit of the earth
In a colder-than-should-be spring
Watching birds chase each other in mating dance exuberance
winter is not done with our part of the world
it breathes from the soil and catches breezes and chills a man
licking and wandering

Still, my head was high and my eyes were sharp
I’ll have a glizzy soon
i thought

My shitkicker shoes, blown out at the sides, tread flapping and ducklike over the cheapest asphault available. The sun was an angry white bead, glaring at her subjects. I was strangely uncomfortable. This is familiar territory, thought I. This is where I live. But something was off. Something was unknown.

I walked into kwik trip with something like an inhale. Here is where i visit every day. Here is where there are glizzies. Youth is pressing outward, for novelty and risk. Maturity wants things familiar, wants constancy. Here i breathe in the familiar. The steady routine.

I approached, with admittedly naive optimism, the glizzy station. As I rounded the corner, my eyes lowered to the sterling rollers where glizzies should be, and there was nothing.

The absence had presence. I stopped like a cough in physical discomfort to witness the empty glizzy station. Finely machined, stainless steel rollers, heating elements, a front-facing facefront that shows the most beautiful glizzy you’ve ever seen. Inactive. Dead. Nothing.There are glizzies somewhere, but not here

And of course my thoughts unspool into ragged tendrils. How can you think about anything when everything is bumping up against something else? There are no glizzies. What does it mean? What is in a glizzy? Who made this glizzy cooker-display-machine? Who drove the truck to get the product here before? Why did his great-grandmother commit suicide? How many glizzies can i fit in a fannypack?

Everything is touching everything else.

Still haven’t tracked down a glizzy. They’re common, robust, and you can buy a whole pack of them for next to nothing. Eat a glizzy today, so you can remember it tomorrow.

Highlow

There exists within me an ideation of the best version of me. And it would mean I’m like a 6’5 buff guy with white-guy dreadlocks who also has a jetpack and can sing in perfect pitch. This has also been my New Year’s Resolution for about seven years, secretly. (It’s not panning out)

So as a consolation, I’ve been thinking about what is the best version of me given the present circumstances.

The present version of me is near middle-aged, renting a dumpy apartment, no kids except for my Yoncho and Tibby, earning decent enough money at a job with no grand prospects, driving a car from George W. Bush’s first term and now the brakes are fucking up on me.

I imagine a lot of people will read the preceding paragraph as Grim, but I’ve never been much for keeping pace with my peers or fitting in with the group. In fact, I’ll have you know, I have a kind of disdain for people who bow to societal pressure. There are millions of people my age who put on Macy’s sweaters and pose with their kids in front of their fireplaces to send out christmas cards (also they owe multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars on said houses) in order to emulate some kind of Way You’re Supposed to Do It.

There’s a prescribed, easy on-board ramp into what society and capitalism wants from you. You do what your mommy and daddy did. Wouldn’t you know it? It involves spending more and more money, trying to keep up with or outdo everyone else. In the most boring, saccharine, performative thing you’ve been taught your whole life.

It’s much better to plant yourself at the base of that tree and start cutting. Offer your mind things that terrify you. Cut away at the wick of the tree. Take way too many drugs! Get drunk and wake up the next day, and not remember how you got that scrape on your knee or that scar on your chest! Drag your steel over that vein, and be thankful. I fucked up, I don’t remember why! Nobody’s mad at me!

I think the best version of me is the one where I keep it all in mind. Each person is equal. Each person comes here in the same way. This is not dumb metaphysical bullshit. Each person enters the world small and afraid and knowing nothing. Each person dies. The interim is immensely defined by time and space and the color and shape of the things they have no control over.

My religion is that. Of mutual respect for those of us tempest-tossed in this place. Of knowing that all that is happening comes from the same place and all goes to the same place. To assume primacy over another is to sin, and to perform kindness is what brings you closer to Heaven. Heaven is dying without fear.

Heaven is dying without fear.

And if you know any jetpack and/or white dreadlock guys, please let me know.

Updown

Look down.

You see your feet, and your carpet, and also the carpet on the floor. This is where your vision ends. This is the navigable space in our everyday lives. The physical, ownable and monetizable space wherein the day to day happens. Each moment, your eyes stop at the floor, the wall, the doorway. This makes sense. This is the framework wherein experience happens for us. The consequences usually come from within a few dozen feet.

An animal like us, with sharp eyes and a big brain, and not much else, can garner so much from a cursory glance or a peek over the shoulder. This works, more or less.

But now, I want you to look down. And really look down. And try to see not with those two eyes you normally use, but use that third one. Use that one that’s buried under your mortgage and your alarm clock and your envy. Pop open that peeper and let’s explore.

And you peer down through the floor, and below your apartment is another apartment. An older woman lives down there. She doesn’t have a car. She stands outside and smokes cigarettes sometimes. She has a lifetime of friends and lovers and disappointment. If you talked to her from dawn to dusk you would continually be learning new things. Her inner world, her mind, is rich and elaborate. Her life has immeasurably impacted hundreds of others. You will never speak with her. Her stories trail away as we look deeper down.

You are now in the dirt. The topsoil. This is a universe unto itself. Worms, ants, plant roots, fungii, moles. A cold and dark ecosystem where nothing has eyes. We’ve got whole religious systems dedicated to the sun, and these guys don’t give a fuck. Nutrients filter down and get reprocessed and keep the daywalkers fat and happy. The damp and tunnelling crew keeps living here.

We’re deeper now, boring into the earth with our truesight. The geography has become sandstone and fossils. Imitations of living things become sluice casts. We can guess at these bodyforms, watch the continents drift. A fossil of a fern from back then looks just the same as a living fern today. This fractal spiral beauty recedes from view as we move farther down.

Now we’re getting into the gigantic slabs of iron, nickel, gold. The primal bones of our world roil here. Continents of minerals swirl deep within the earth. The capitalists would rape these if it were practical to do so to boost the next fiscal quarter’s profits. They have no means of extracting them yet.

Deeper still, mother earth’s heart is a burning solid ball of an iron-nickel alloy, so I’d wager it tastes and smells like pennies. A ten thousand degree sphere, still cooking from the creation of the universe. Old Faithful squirts because of this internal battery. The core of our planet is still mystery, because how could you possibly get there? Unless you were looking down like we are. Plunging through the heartmind of our mother. We continue through the aftermath of the birth of the universe. No big deal.

And as above, so below, sure. The other side of the world has everything I just talked about in reverse order. Dinosaurs, worms, apartments. Sure.

And if you stare down long enough, you’re looking up. Be careful with your reverence for the stars and the moon. There are constellations on the other side of the earth. Creation watches you back. Its enormity and cruelty watches you. Look up and be humbled by the night. Be proud of your son. Dinosaurs, worms, apartments. Sure.

Be humbled by the stark black gaze of your cat. Watch everything move without you. Be thankful. I love the winedark sea of the night. The stars shimmer. If this isn’t nice, what is?

“Hey, I’ve got some tomatoes that are really good, you wanna try one?”

Through clenched teeth, using almost all mental energy to supress the gag reflex, “Sure”

“Here, have a slice”

a bone white, pock-marked lattice wheel of fibrous arms houses an inflamed-red watery and tumorous pulp, interspersed with mite-like seeds

I’m pale and clammy but I say “Yum”

“Do you want some salt?”

“Sure,” I answer.

I pour salt onto this lump of indecent mush that somehow makes me think of something born premature and also long-dead. I gather strength and courtesy as the quivering ooze nears my mouth. As I bite into the stiff globule, its awful skin begins to unspool, a thin thread of bitter paper to herald the disgusting crush of garbage-smell and acridity into my face.

Chewing only finds new ways to suffer. A blandish muck, with notes of mildew and insects. Mouth is sogging through a texture similar to soaked toilet paper. A few beads of salt touch the roof of my mouth.

I don’t swallow so much as gulp. The trial has ended.

“Pretty good right?”

“Uh, yeah. I just don’t like tomatoes that much.”

Impossible to know what time it is.

I’m one of the old people. There used to be a bright day and a dark night. Each morning, the sun would warm the horizon into a purple and orange butter when it rose, and it would glare into swords of radiance as it sunk into the west, streaming red and yellow fingers into the twilight. At night, a hypnotic indigo rested over us. Seemingly pinpricked by diamonds of pure white, so clarion and pristine as to inspire religions and draw our minds into it. A ribbon of beauty was the spine of the night. Flowing over the vastness, a milky-honey, a band of majesty to stir owls and to wonder us.

There was once a difference between the night and the day.

My eyes open to introduce me to another episode of the new real. I have slept but I have not rested. The ash has found the pockets of my nose and my lips. I spit and wipe my face. Everything I see is grey.

I never speak. Why would I?

The wind stinks like burning rubber and I’m exhausted. I stand, take two steps, and kneel down. I put my forehead into my fist and it feels cold. I close my eyes and I’m too dehydrated to cry. I listen to my ragged breath as microplastic particulate batters my skin. Memories flog my mind. Happy memories batter my sentience like a lash. My son learns to ride a bike, and I remember the explosion in Reno. My wife cooks my favorite meal, and she is carried off by bandits. My weakness, my impotence in the face of a cruel imitation of what my life once was. Impossible to know what time it is. I heave to breathe, my skeletal ribcage working to draw in this plastic/air mixture.

I crawl, as best I can, to a pile of refuse. It is a mixture of dirt, human bones, and unsold Oculus Rifts. I imagine this will be my pieta, cradled in the filth of the world that knew time. I snuggle up, nudging my head against the skulls of other old people. I try to think of last words, but they are all references. I can’t come up with any of my own.

And then I hear a sound

Something I’d lost long ago comes roaring back into me, it’s endorphins or love or humanity. I don’t know, much less care, what this could be. The sound is a song. It’s enveloping me. It’s ringing my veins and pulling me out of my death-stupor. It rears back and displays like a cobra and looks me in the eyes and commands that I have strength. The song locks into my soul and animates my fragile dust-skin body. I will walk. I will.

I will without time, without anyone to watch. And as almost all humans have walked, without time watching them, without a faint whisper to honor their names, without a gossamer of love to remember them by, I walk.

[If you want this to be a serious post, stop reading. if you want this to be funny, this is the song:]

The idea of objective truth is contained entirely within the subjective minds of human beings. The scientific method posits that whatever is observable and repeatable under the same circumstances must be Truth. It has no means of validating an event that occurs once.

This is useful. The human mind rewards itself with dopamine hits for recognizing patterns. Medicine and technology work because we fuck around and find patterns. However, practicality and application are not Truth. No matter how much they seem like they must be. Science is a tool. It is an application of a way of thinking. It is not self-evident Truth. For hundreds of years, priest-philosophers were the closest things to scientists. Their base assumption was that the Christian God was real, and all their thinking was framed by this basic truth. And these were not dumb people. The smartest people alive had this rubric framing their thoughts.There were many brilliant people who thought that sometimes your blood just went bad, and you had to bleed all that bad blood out. But you actually had typhoid or something.

The modes of assuming reality change. They evolve. They apply themselves to the zeitgeist. This is working for now, so it must be golden.

Anyway, enough about that fucking shit, I want to talk about Mothman.

West Virginia. Blue ridge mountains. Shenandoah River.

On November 15, 1966,in the cultural backwater of West Virginia, a young couple was driving around by an old World War II munitions plant, and they found themselves pursued by a giant monster. A creature, humanoid in shape, with great grey wings of shadow, eyes glowing red. A terrifying, otherworldly creature. Chasing them. Maybe an overly elaborate cover story for a guy who didn’t get his girlfriend back home before curfew, you think.

However, other people kept seeing this shit. A pair of firemen saw a creature in a field whose eyes glowed bright red when they put a light on him.

The Mothman supposedly landed on the Silver Bridge, which connected West Virginia to Ohio. Eyewitnesses said he landed on a high point on the bridge, and then, in real life, it collapsed. 46 people died, plunging from their cars into the shrapnel and cold December river water. Now, there is a statue of Mothman in that town. I imagine getting stuck in traffic on a bridge, looking up to the steel lattice supporting me, and a grey humanoid with glowing red eyes watching me, deep dark doom filling my stomach, and the bottom of everything falling out from under me. Steel and rebar and concrete batter me as I sink into ice water, and primal panic forces me to suck death into my lungs.

Science says Mothman is not provable, probably. Probable. The people dying bloody in a river saw him. A grotesque mounting the instrument of mass death. The impossible happens. It happens all the time.